SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
acid andy (1683)
(email not shown publicly)
https://soylentn ... nonymous+Coward/
Rationalistic, dualistic, vegan, cynical, scientific hippie
I've taken the advice, "Make your own action", from the kind AC in the comments of my previous journal entry. I've occupied my brain for a little while by writing the following.
-------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Hoojgruggwidd's Untitled Adventures
Chapter One
Mr. Hoojgruggwidd picked his way carefully through the long grasses of the vast plain that stretched away from him endlessly in all directions. Running short of breath now, he paused for a while quietly, taking in his surroundings and he started to listen for sounds. He wondered if his mind was playing tricks on him because he'd just perceived a noise that was quiet enough and odd enough that he figured he must be imagining it. He held his breath, kept deathly still and concentrated hard and, yes, the unearthly, almost musical, muttering noise was still there, barely distinguishable against his mildly irritating tinnitus. Puzzled and a little disconcerted, he turned his head this way and that, trying to start to get some vague idea of the sound's direction. The purplish clouds had blown away now and scorching hot sun beat down upon his sore forehead. He sighed deeply and every one of his muscles seemed to ache terribly. He must have been wandering around these plains for about five weeks now. Almost nothing to eat and a few gulps of foul, slightly greenish mud was all he had managed to drink.
As he stumbled around erratically from one direction to another, always trying to close in on the sound, after what seemed like an eternity he noticed it finally seemed to be getting louder. He continued towards the strange sound for several minutes more until he suddenly caught sight of a number of shadowy, curvy figures, scattered around in the long grasses. They were a blueish grey in color and didn't appear to have any faces, which worried Mr. Hoojgruggwidd somewhat. Something about them reminded him of amphibians as well. Enormous tadpoles but with humanoid limbs and bluer skin, he thought.
"We're... the... Dzorgluns." The sounds the figure made were hardly even recognizable as a voice. Aside from the staccato pauses between their words, they sounded, Mr. Hoojgruggwidd imagined, a little like a cross between a low whistling wind and perhaps a very weird variant of a harmonica that also had been run over multiple times by stampedes of wilderbeest. There was an eerie, subtle sort of harmony in the figure's voice as well. It was very unsettling indeed.
"We... don't like doing.... anything other than.... what we... are... doing now." the figure explained.
"What's that then? What exactly are you doing now?" inquired Mr. Hoojgruggwidd impatiently, increasingly tired and bewildered.
"Well,... we just sort... of.... hang around.... waiting.... for... someone else to do... something interesting."
"Do you indeed? Frightfully sorry but I really don't think I would be able to assist you in that particular endeavor."
"Oh... But... Well... I... I mean... I... I rather expected... I mean,... when.... you first... arrived here I... did think that.... you were going... to..."
"Going to WHAT?!" snapped Mr. Hoojgruggwidd, who was far too weary and hungry to be humoring these odd beings who, he suddenly thought, might be incredibly dangerous.
"I... When... you first... arrived... I rather... expected... you were going... to do..." the figure continued in its wheezy gusts.
"YES, going to do WHAT?!"
"When... you first..," (Mr. Hoojgruggwidd lowered his head into his hands in utter despair) "arrived... I did... think... that you... were... going... to... do something.... interesting. That was it. Something interesting."
Mr. Hoojgruggwidd looked up amazed and raised his eyebrows but didn't dare speak again and eventually the figure continued "But... you... didn't do... anything... interesting."
Mr. Hoojgruggwidd had looked away for a second trying to make sense of this bizarre situation, but when he looked back, the strange figures had completely vanished. He dropped to the ground, totally baffled but within fifteen minutes he had fallen fast asleep, the scorching hot sunlight still streaming onto his dusty skin.
As previously stated, I write as a socially awkward, nerdy prima donna. I'm entitled to my internets. Somebody give me my dopamine hit, dammit. Depriving a needy nerd of his textually-sourced dopamine hits is tantamount to theft, I'll have you know! It just isn't cricket.
I wonder what the theoretical maximum number of dopamine hits is that a human brain can receive in a day through using an internet forum. Who holds the world record and how did it happen? Urgh, I guess there are some questions that shouldn't ever be answered. I'll leave them to the likes of Farcebook.
After the tragic loss of lots of recent SoylentNews articles, my browser cache thoughtfully spat out an old front page for your enjoyment.
If anyone wants to use this to resubmit any of these, or if you'd rather discuss them here, go for it (wo)man!
Here we go. SoylentNews time machine powering up... Initializing..... BAM:
21/05/20/0529259 story
posted by Fnord666 on Thursday May 20, @08:49AM a.STC {display: inline-block; float: right;} html body div#frame div#contents div#index div#articles div.article div.details a.STC {display: none;} [Skip to comment(s)] --> [Skip to comment(s)]
Staff at the freenode IRC network have resigned en-masse after control of it passed to what one described as a "narcissistic Trumpian wannabe korean royalty bitcoins millionaire." Resignation letters piled up from Fuchs, Ed Kellett, Emīls Piņķis, Jessica Sophie Porter and others, capping weeks of drama in the FOSS world's biggest chatbox.
https://boingboing.net/2021/05/19/freenode-irc-staff-quit-after-new-owner-seizes-control.html
http://techrights.org/2021/05/14/how-freenode-works/
https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/19/freenode_staff_resigns/
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Free-Software-Exits-Freenode
- Read More...
- 1 comment
21/05/20/0132216 story
posted by martyb on Thursday May 20, @06:17AM a.STC {display: inline-block; float: right;} html body div#frame div#contents div#index div#articles div.article div.details a.STC {display: none;} [Skip to comment(s)] --> [Skip to comment(s)]
from the Cosmic-litterer dept.Interstellar Comet Borisov Was Leaking Metal When It Zipped Past Us in 2020:
Gaseous nickel was shedding from interstellar comet 2I/Borisov when it briefly visited our solar system two years ago, according to a new study. Sounds like weird behavior for a comet, but as related research shows, the spewing of atomic metals might actually be a regular thing that comets do, whether they're local or from across the Milky Way.
Two new papers, published in the journal Nature, are updating our understanding of comets, both in terms of their origins and the conditions under which they formed. Combined, the papers are allowing for an unprecedented comparative analysis, in which astronomers are contrasting local comets to one that formed far, far away.
We're talking about interstellar comet 2I/Borisov, which visited our solar system in January 2020. Astronomers were able to identify its interstellar nature owing to its peculiar orbit. Recent research suggests Borisov is a fragment of a Pluto-like object, having formed in the Kuiper belt of its home star system. Borisov is often overshadowed by 'Oumuamua—the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system (which it did in 2017)—but Borisov is equally deserving of attention, mostly because of the similarities it shares with native comets.
[...] Taken together, the two papers point to a common process of cometary origin. These shared chemical properties imply that native comets and Borisov formed under similar conditions and in similar places within their respective star systems. And as Bodewits and Bromley explain, should astronomers be able to "unravel the origin of iron and nickel in regular comets and this interstellar object," they may "uncover a story of organic chemistry between shared different planetary systems."
Not sure which is more interesting, gaseous nickel, or metallic hydrogen.
Journal References:
1.) Piotr Guzik, Michał Drahus. Gaseous atomic nickel in the coma of interstellar comet 2I/Borisov, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03485-4)
2.) J. Manfroid, D. Hutsemékers, E. Jehin. Iron and nickel atoms in cometary atmospheres even far from the Sun, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03435-0)
- Read More...
- 3 comments
21/05/19/208225 story
posted by Fnord666 on Thursday May 20, @03:47AM a.STC {display: inline-block; float: right;} html body div#frame div#contents div#index div#articles div.article div.details a.STC {display: none;} [Skip to comment(s)] --> [Skip to comment(s)]
from the what-do-you-mean-"QA"?-Isn't-that-why-we-have-users? dept.Recent Windows 10 Update Blocks Microsoft Teams, Outlook Logins:
A recent Windows 10 1909 cumulative update prevents Microsoft 365 desktop users from logging into Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft OneDrive for Business.
When attempting to login, users are shown a message stating, "We ran into a problem. Reconnecting..." and asking the user to restart the program.
[...] To fix this issue, Microsoft states that you need to restart Windows 10 again after the update finishes installing.
[...] If reboot Windows 10 does not resolve the issue, Microsoft recommends that you use the web versions of the Microsoft Teams, OneDrive for Business, and Outlook applications while they investigate the problem.
The issue is caused by cumulative update kb5003169.
<sarcasm>It's too bad Microsoft couldn't find anyone to test their update before it was released.</sarcasm>
- Read More...
- 5 comments
21/05/19/1928232 story
posted by martyb on Thursday May 20, @01:16AM a.STC {display: inline-block; float: right;} html body div#frame div#contents div#index div#articles div.article div.details a.STC {display: none;} [Skip to comment(s)] --> [Skip to comment(s)]
from the Buying-Opportunity? dept.Overnight, a broad selloff of prominent cryptocurrencies has vaporized billions of dollars in value. Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency affected, is off more than 18 percent in the last 24 hours. Currently, it's worth just over half what it was in mid-April. Over the past week, more than $600 billion has been wiped out of a wide range of more than 7,000 cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, ether, and meme coins like dogecoin, according to CoinGecko.
The causes for the selloff are myriad. The first shot across the bow came last week when Tesla CEO Elon Musk declared that his company would no longer be accepting bitcoin for car purchases. The change happened less than two months after he said that Tesla would accept bitcoin, and the about-face came as Musk said he is concerned about the environmental damages being wrought by the energy-intensive cryptocurrency. (His thinking on the matter may have been influenced by an Ars article about a private equity firm that revived a zombie power plant just to mine bitcoin.)
Check up-to-date prices online at CoinBase.
- Read More...
- 16 comments
21/05/19/1917210 story
posted by martyb on Wednesday May 19, @10:46PM a.STC {display: inline-block; float: right;} html body div#frame div#contents div#index div#articles div.article div.details a.STC {display: none;} [Skip to comment(s)] --> [Skip to comment(s)]
Ampere will switch from using Arm's "Neoverse" cores to custom ARM cores developed in-house:
Today's big reveal comes in regard to the microarchitecture choices that Ampere is going to be using starting in their next generation 2022 "Siryn" design, successor to the Altra Max, and relates to the CPU IP being used:
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16684/AmpereStrategyRoadmapFinal_5.png
Starting with Siryn, Ampere will be switching over from Arm's Neoverse cores to their new in-house full custom CPU microarchitecture. This announcement admittedly caught us completely off-guard, as we had largely expected Ampere to continue to be using Arm's Neoverse cores for the foreseeable future. The switch to a new full custom microarchitecture puts Ampere on a completely different trajectory than we had initially expected from the company.
In fact, Ampere explains that what the move towards a full custom microarchitecture core design was actually always the plan for the company since its inception, and their custom CPU design had been in the works for the past 3+ years.
[...] Ampere's explanation and rationale for designing a full custom core from the ground up, is that they are claiming they are able to achieve better performance and better power efficiency in datacentre workloads compared to what Arm's Neoverse "more general purpose" designs are able to achieve. This is quite an interesting claim to make, and contrasts Arm's projections and goals for their Neoverse cores. The recent Neoverse V1 and N2 cores were unveiled in more detail last month and are claimed to achieve significant generational IPC gains.
Previously: 80-Core Arm CPU To Bring Lower Power, Higher Density To A Rack Near You
Ampere Announces Altra ARM CPUs with Up to 80 Cores, Going to 128 Cores by 2021
ARM Announces Neoverse V1 and N2 Cores
80-Core Ampere Altra Server CPU Competes Well Against Xeon and Epyc
- Read More...
- 4 comments
21/05/19/1620237 story
posted by martyb on Wednesday May 19, @08:19PM a.STC {display: inline-block; float: right;} html body div#frame div#contents div#index div#articles div.article div.details a.STC {display: none;} [Skip to comment(s)] --> [Skip to comment(s)]
from the gotta-catch-them-all dept.In the last year, Nintendo sold roughly 5.8 million Switch units to households that already had at least one Switch. That's according to a recently translated investor Q&A in which Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said that "household demand for multiple systems accounted for roughly 20% of [28.83 million] unit sales of the Nintendo Switch family of systems" for the fiscal year ending March 31.
While Nintendo said in 2019 that "some households have already purchased multiple consoles," this is our first concrete look into just how much multi-Switch households are contributing to the Switch's sales, which now amount to over 85 million units over the system's lifetime. And Furukawa thinks the trend of multi-Switch households is only set to increase.
- Read More...
- 13 comments
21/05/19/1417215 story
posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 19, @05:46PM a.STC {display: inline-block; float: right;} html body div#frame div#contents div#index div#articles div.article div.details a.STC {display: none;} [Skip to comment(s)] --> [Skip to comment(s)]
Google wants to build a useful quantum computer by 2029
Google is aiming to build a "useful, error-corrected quantum computer" by the end of the decade, the company explained in a blog post. The search giant hopes the technology will help solve a range of big problems like feeding the world and climate change to developing better medicines. To develop the technology, Google has unveiled a new Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara containing a quantum data center, hardware research labs, and quantum processor chip fabrication facilities. It will spend billions developing the technology over the next decade, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The target announced at Google I/O on Tuesday comes a year and a half after Google said it had achieved quantum supremacy, a milestone where a quantum computer has performed a calculation that would be impossible on a traditional classical computer. Google says its quantum computer was able to perform a calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken 10,000 years or more on a traditional supercomputer. But competitors racing to build quantum computers of their own cast doubt on Google's claimed progress. Rather than taking 10,000 years, IBM argued at the time that a traditional supercomputer could actually perform the task in 2.5 days or less.
This extra processing power could be useful to simulate molecules, and hence nature, accurately, Google says. This might help us design better batteries, creating more carbon-efficient fertilizer, or develop more targeted medicines, because a quantum computer could run simulations before a company invests in building real-world prototypes. Google also expects quantum computing to have big benefits for AI development.
If it's useful for simulations and AI, then video games and smartphones could use it by 2045.
See also: Google I/O 2021: the 14 biggest announcements
Google I/O unveils new features for Google Cloud, collaboration tools
Android 12 Beta released with revamped user interfaceRelated: Google's 72-Qubit "Bristlecone" Chip: Does It Demonstrate "Quantum Supremacy"?
Quantum Supremacy and Neven's Law
Google Quantum Processor Reportedly Achieves Quantum Supremacy
IBM and Google's Race for Quantum Computing Takes a Mysterious Turn
Google: We've achieved quantum supremacy! IBM: Nope. And stop using that word, please
Here's What the People Who Claimed Google's Quantum Supremacy Have to Say About It
Why I Dislike What "Quantum Supremacy" is Doing to Computing Research
Google Says It Just Ran the First-Ever Quantum Simulation of a Chemical Reaction
- Read More...
- 15 comments
21/05/19/1257229 story
posted by martyb on Wednesday May 19, @03:26PM a.STC {display: inline-block; float: right;} html body div#frame div#contents div#index div#articles div.article div.details a.STC {display: none;} [Skip to comment(s)] --> [Skip to comment(s)]
from the check-the-Matrix-(again!) dept.Samsung shows off foldable display concepts of the not-too-distant future
The first concept (above) has been rumored for some time. Samsung's "S Foldable" OLED panel shows a mobile device that folds in two places. When folded outwards, it has a display size of 7.2-inches, making it appear more tablet-like than some of the best foldable phones on the market like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2. That said, it's been rumored that Samsung is preparing to launch this display concept as an actual product later this year alongside the Galaxy Z Fold 3.
Samsung also showed off a Slidable OLED display, not unlike the LG Rollable that was once in development. Similar to how the OPPO X 2021 functions, this device will extend outwards from one side to reveal a larger display when needed.
Other concepts are more focused on larger tablet and PC devices. One showcases a 17-inch foldable that resembles the Microsoft Surface Duo's larger, unreleased brother, the Surface Neo. The other device is a more traditional laptop but with Samsung's Under Panel Camera (UPC), which many OEMs have been trying to develop for smartphones. This indicates that we could see the technology arrive first in Samsung PCs, although some rumors have indicated that it will show up on the upcoming Galaxy Z Fold successor.
By the way, the Surface Neo may be dead, along with Windows 10X.
Also at The Verge and Gizmodo.
See also: Galaxy Z Roll Trademark Filed by Samsung Hinting at a New Rollable Phone
Foldable Pixel Codenamed 'Passport' & Pixel 6 Series Get Referenced in Android 12 Beta
- Read More...
- 15 comments
21/05/19/1254241 story
posted by martyb on Wednesday May 19, @12:54PM a.STC {display: inline-block; float: right;} html body div#frame div#contents div#index div#articles div.article div.details a.STC {display: none;} [Skip to comment(s)] --> [Skip to comment(s)]
from the check-the-Matrix dept.Newly discovered quasicrystal was created by the first nuclear explosion at Trinity Site
The newly discovered material was formed accidentally in the blast of the first atomic bomb test, which resulted in the fusion of surrounding sand, the test tower, and copper transmission lines into a glassy material known as trinitite. Quasicrystals are exotic material that break the rules of classical crystalline materials. Materials such as sugar, salt, or quartz form crystals with what is known as a periodic order: the atoms are arranged in a pattern that repeats itself in three dimensions. Quasicrystals, first discovered in the 1980s, have an atomic structure of the constituent elements, but the pattern is not periodic. The quasicrystal, created by the Trinity explosion in a sample of red trinitite, has 5-fold rotational symmetry, which is not possible in a natural crystal. The symmetry group of the quasicrystal is the same as that of the regular 20-sided solid known as an icosahedron, and the chemistry is given by the formula Si61Cu30Ca7Fe2. This new quasicrystal is now the oldest known human-made quasicrystal, with an unmistakable timestamp (through its composition, discovery location, and radioactivity), indicating its moment of origin.
"Quasicrystals are formed in extreme environments that rarely exist on Earth," said [co-author Terry C.] Wallace, who is a geophysicist. "They require a traumatic event with extreme shock, temperature, and pressure. We don't typically see that, except in something as dramatic as a nuclear explosion." The thermodynamic/shock conditions under which this quasicrystal formed are roughly comparable to those that formed the natural quasicrystals discovered in the Khatyrka meteorite, which dates back at least hundreds of millions of years and perhaps as far back as the beginning of the solar system.
Journal Reference:
Luca Bindi, William Kolb, G. Nelson Eby, et al. Accidental synthesis of a previously unknown quasicrystal in the first atomic bomb test [$], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2101350118)
- Read More...
- 14 comments
21/05/19/0341211 story
posted by mrpg on Wednesday May 19, @10:00AM a.STC {display: inline-block; float: right;} html body div#frame div#contents div#index div#articles div.article div.details a.STC {display: none;} [Skip to comment(s)] --> [Skip to comment(s)]
New evidence of how and when the Milky Way came together:
New research provides the best evidence to date into the timing of how our early Milky Way came together, including the merger with a key satellite galaxy.
Using relatively new methods in astronomy, the researchers were able to identify the most precise ages currently possible for a sample of about a hundred red giant stars in the galaxy.
With this and other data, the researchers were able to show what was happening when the Milky Way merged with an orbiting satellite galaxy, known as Gaia-Enceladus, about 10 billion years ago.
Journal Reference:
Josefina Montalbán, J. Ted Mackereth, Andrea Miglio, et al. Chronologically dating the early assembly of the Milky Way, Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01347-7)
- Read More...
- 5 comments
21/05/19/0021237 story
posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday May 19, @07:34AM a.STC {display: inline-block; float: right;} html body div#frame div#contents div#index div#articles div.article div.details a.STC {display: none;} [Skip to comment(s)] --> [Skip to comment(s)]
from the Hunk-of-Burning-Love dept.Space craft studying the Sun have captured very cool video. Coverage at The Verge.
One of the instruments aboard Solar Orbiter, a probe built by the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA, caught its first video of a coronal mass ejection while whizzing around the other side of the Sun in February. Solar Orbiter, which launched in early 2020, has detected these massive bursts of energy in the past, but the explosion captured in February this year was an exciting first for NASA.
NASA built the Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager, or the SoloHI instrument for the Solar Orbiter. It recently captured an energetic gust of solar plasma jetting from the star's surface as the spacecraft was meandering around the Sun. Scientists didn't expect the spacecraft to beam back any exciting images at this point — data is slow to reach Earth from such a far distance, and Solar Orbiter's main mission doesn't kick off until November.
This is where you need to go to the link[*], to see the amazing videos.
But SoloHI delivered the goods anyway, as it came out from behind the Sun and reentered Earth's line of sight, beaming back what NASA called a "happy accident." Two other instruments aboard the Solar Orbiter, the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) and the Metis coronagraph, may have captured different views of the coronal mass ejection around the same time.
Scientists are still piecing together the images from the different instruments to get a clear picture of what was going on near the Sun that day. Around the same time that SoloHi recorded its first detection of a coronal mass ejection, EUI and METIS detected a pair of coronal mass ejections. Other solar-focused spacecraft also captured images and video of the eruptions that day.
Just not something you want to see really up close.
[*] Video appears to be available on YouTube.--martyb.
- Read More...
- 4 comments
21/05/19/0016202 story
posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday May 19, @05:03AM a.STC {display: inline-block; float: right;} html body div#frame div#contents div#index div#articles div.article div.details a.STC {display: none;} [Skip to comment(s)] --> [Skip to comment(s)]
from the forest-gardens dept.Indigenous forest gardens remain productive and diverse for over a century:
In the 1930s, an archeologist from the Smithsonian wrote a short paper remarking on the exquisite vegetation around First Nation villages in Alaska. The surroundings were filled with nuts, stone fruit, berries, and herbs—several non-native to the area and many that would never grow together naturally. Apart from this brief mention, however, the significance of these forest gardens went largely overlooked and unrecognized by modern archeology for the next 50-plus years.
In the last few decades, archeologists have learned that perennial forest management—the creation and care of long-lived food-bearing shrubs and plants next to forests—was common among the Indigenous societies of North America's northwestern coast. These forest gardens played a central role in the diet and stability of these cultures in the past, and now a new publication shows that they offer an example of a far more sustainable and biodiverse alternative to conventional agriculture.
[Continues...]
[...] One of the cornerstone species of the Pacific Northwest gardens—hazelnut—was even transplanted from 700 km away. “Hazelnut is a big piece of our understanding of forest gardens because it was one of the first species recognized as having no business being there—but it’s in this nice pocket where we see a cultural explosion about 5000 years ago,” said Chelsey Armstrong, first author of the study. “As I studied, it was increasingly clear that it wasn’t just hazelnut—these were entire ecosystems. And it wasn’t just gathering—this was a completely different food system where there was clearly active management and investment in the landscape.”
Journal References:
1.) Bruce M. Pavlik, Lisbeth A. Louderback, Kenneth B. Vernon, et al. Plant species richness at archaeological sites suggests ecological legacy of Indigenous subsistence on the Colorado Plateau [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2025047118)
2.) Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, Wal’ceckwu Marion Dixon, Nancy J. Turner. Management and Traditional Production of Beaked Hazelnut (k'áp'xw-az' , Corylus cornuta ; Betulaceae) in British Columbia, Human Ecology (DOI: 10.1007/s10745-018-0015-x)
3.) Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, Jesse Miller, Alex McAlvay, et al. Historical Indigenous Land-Use Explains Plant Functional Trait Diversity, Ecology and Society (DOI: 10.5751/ES-12322-260206)
- Read More...
- 375 words in story
- 23 comments
21/05/18/196203 story
posted by martyb on Wednesday May 19, @02:32AM a.STC {display: inline-block; float: right;} html body div#frame div#contents div#index div#articles div.article div.details a.STC {display: none;} [Skip to comment(s)] --> [Skip to comment(s)]
from the opa!-pizdetz! dept.Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate:
In a Twitter discussion last week on ransomware attacks, KrebsOnSecurity noted that virtually all ransomware strains have a built-in failsafe designed to cover the backsides of the malware purveyors: They simply will not install on a Microsoft Windows computer that already has one of many types of virtual keyboards installed — such as Russian or Ukrainian. So many readers had questions in response to the tweet that I thought it was worth a blog post exploring this one weird cyber defense trick.
[...] DarkSide, like a great many other malware strains, has a hard-coded do-not-install list of countries which are the principal members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) — former Soviet satellites that mostly have favorable relations with the Kremlin.[*]
Simply put, countless malware strains will check for the presence of one of these languages on the system, and if they're detected the malware will exit and fail to install.
[...] Will installing one of these languages keep your Windows computer safe from all malware? Absolutely not. There is plenty of malware that doesn't care where in the world you are. And there is no substitute for adopting a defense-in-depth posture, and avoiding risky behaviors online.
[Continues...]
But is there really a downside to taking this simple, free, prophylactic approach? None that I can see, other than perhaps a sinking feeling of capitulation.
[...] "This is for their legal protection," Nixon[**] said. "Installing a Cyrillic keyboard, or changing a specific registry entry to say 'RU', and so forth, might be enough to convince malware that you are Russian and off limits. This can technically be used as a 'vaccine' against Russian malware."
[...] To install a different keyboard language on a Windows 10 computer the old fashioned way, hit the Windows key and X at the same time, then select Settings, and then select "Time and Language." Select Language, and then scroll down and you should see an option to install another character set. Pick one, and the language should be installed the next time you reboot. Again, if for some reason you need to toggle between languages, Windows+Spacebar is your friend.
[*] The full list is provided in the linked article.
[**] Allison Nixon, chief research officer at New York City-based cyber investigations firm Unit221B.
- Read More...
- 387 words in story
- 32 comments
21/05/18/1839227 story
posted by martyb on Tuesday May 18, @11:56PM a.STC {display: inline-block; float: right;} html body div#frame div#contents div#index div#articles div.article div.details a.STC {display: none;} [Skip to comment(s)] --> [Skip to comment(s)]
from the Department-of-Head-Shrinkery dept.Scientists have long studied the fallibility of human memory. False-memory research has been controversial. Cognitive scientists and psychologists often disagree on how easy it is to develop false memories and how often that occurs. It has also been controversial partly because police investigations and court proceedings rely on the quality of memories. Researchers in Germany and the U.K. said they were able to plant false memories and then help study volunteers root them out, work that suggests potential remedies to ease the problem of erroneous recollections. In this new study, researchers sought to prove what they said was a relatively unexplored area of research: how to undo false memories.
New study finds false memories can be reversed:
The study highlights - for the first time - techniques that can correct false recollections without damaging true memories
[...] "By empowering people to stay closer to their own truth, rather than rely on other sources, we showed we could help them realise what might be false or misremembered – something that could be very beneficial in forensic settings." — Dr Hartmut Blank, Reader in Experimental and Social Psychology
Journal Reference:
Aileen Oeberst, Merle Madita Wachendörfer, Roland Imhoff, et al. Rich false memories of autobiographical events can be reversed [$], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2026447118)
- Read More...
- 15 comments
21/05/18/1437233 story
posted by janrinok on Tuesday May 18, @09:21PM a.STC {display: inline-block; float: right;} html body div#frame div#contents div#index div#articles div.article div.details a.STC {display: none;} [Skip to comment(s)] --> [Skip to comment(s)]
from the I'll-not-drink-to-that! dept.Alcohol appears to have an immediate—or near-immediate—effect on heart rhythm, significantly increasing the chance that an episode of atrial fibrillation (AFib) will occur, according to new data presented at the American College of Cardiology's 70th Annual Scientific Session.
The data revealed that just one glass of wine, beer or other alcoholic beverage was associated with twofold greater odds of an episode of AFib occurring within the next four hours. Among people having two or more drinks in one sitting, there was a more than threefold higher chance of experiencing AFib. Using an alcohol sensor placed on participants' ankles, which passively monitored alcohol intake, the investigators found that every 0.1% increase in inferred blood alcohol concentration over the previous 12 hours was associated with an approximate 40% higher odds of an AFib episode. Evidence from those sensors also demonstrated that the total alcohol concentration over time also predicted the chance AFib would occur.
"Alcohol is the most commonly consumed drug in the world, and there is still a lot we don't understand about what it does to our bodies and, in particular, our hearts," said Gregory M. Marcus, MD, cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and the study's lead author. "Based on our data, we found that alcohol can acutely influence the likelihood that an episode of AFib will occur within a few hours, and the more alcohol consumed, the higher the risk of having an event."
[Continues...]
AFib is the most common heart rhythm disorder. It is often characterized by a rapid, chaotic and fluttery heartbeat. Marcus said that people can experience a range of symptoms. Some may not feel anything, while others are overcome with severe shortness of breath, fatigue, fainting or near fainting spells and a disconcerting sensation that the heart is beating out of control. AFib also results in costly use of health care services, including visits to the emergency department, hospitalizations and procedures each year. Over time, AFib can lead to heart failure, stroke and dementia if untreated.
Researchers enrolled 100 patients with paroxysmal or intermittent AFib, which tends to go away within a short period of time (unlike chronic AFib). Patients in the study were 64 years old on average; the majority were white (85%) or male (80%). Past medical history, medications and lifestyle habits were assessed through chart reviews and patient interviews. Each participant was fitted with a wearable heart monitor that continuously tracked their heart rhythm and an ankle sensor to objectively detect when more than two to three drinks were consumed on a given occasion. Participants were asked to press a button on the heart monitor each time they had an alcoholic drink. Finger stick blood tests measuring alcohol consumption in the previous few weeks were also used to corroborate self-reported drinking events. Because researchers used repeated measurements from the same individual, they served as their own control over time. Overall, more than half (56) had an episode of AFib during the four-week study.
The study was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
- Read More...
- 534 words in story
- 21 comments
< Yesterday's News >
------------------------------------
Ha ha, that's so cool. I didn't think it would keep the formatting, but the preview looks vaguely half decent.
Enjoy!
Humans. They're almost without exception moody, egotistical, greedy, irrational, superstitious, narrow-minded, ignorant, inconsistent, aggressive, destructive, divisive, petulant, entitled, selfish, bigoted, apes.
I'm generally glad we exist and grateful to be one but they don't half do my head in.
Fuck politics. Fuck all the endless, repetitive, disingenuous, shallow and biased arguments.
If we cut out all the crap--no, it's crap underneath too--I mean, stripped away all the spin and chiseled away what little is left of the thin veneer of respectability of western so-called democracy, then maybe we could be honest with ourselves and one another.
Everyone could fill out a form. They're given one hundred points and they have to divide them up between, for example, the following beneficiaries:
- Yourself
- Your immediate family
- Other humans in your socio-economic group
- All other humans in your country
- Other humans in the rest of the world
- Non-human animals
- Plants
- Non-animal, non-plant life forms
- Minerals on Earth (or, to take this a bit more seriously, Natural habitats)
- Outer space
How you divide it up determines what level of sacrifice you are willing to submit yourself to support various other groups, and in what proportions. There are a few glaring problems such as overlap between the categories and a lack of flexibility to categorize beneficiaries by some other chosen attributes (i.e. bigotries--because that's what political affiliations really are when we get down to it--different configurations of bigotry). Another difficulty is answering what exactly constitutes beneficial treatment for a member of each group. Are we purely talking about allocating funds or are we talking about degrees of freedom versus regulation and control?
You might complain that almost everyone will allocate at least ninety points to Yourself and so it shouldn't be on the list, but then if we had various demographic categories they'd pick the one that they belong to, so let's just drop all pretense and call a spade a spade here! Let people face up to their naked greed.
The real problem is humans are so damned ignorant, selfish and greedy, that a ballot like the above would very likely give rise to a system very much like the one we have today, where the vulnerable are left to rot and the planet is trashed to make a few extra bucks.
Yeah I know I devoted five of my bullet points to what's usually referred to as the Enviornment. Deal with it.
Well the media have to keep the narrative going but it looks to me like Trump got it.
They're already trying to blame the progressives which would be laughable if it wasn't so miserably sad. It should have been Sanders.
I'm left rooting for the only ones that still have a chance: rats, lagomorphs, cockroaches, and extremophile bacteria.
SNOTTITES FOR US PRESIDENT 2024! GO SNOTTITES!
Brain fog. For those of you who haven't experienced it or perhaps experience something different to me, I'll try to describe the mental state that I apply that name to.
You want very much to get on with a project so you're thinking about it a lot--often particularly when you're busy with something mundane like eating your breakfast or showering--and so you decide that you will indeed get on with it. Getting on with it involves refreshing your memory about where you got up to, picking a sub-task that needs doing and then breaking that sub-task down further to arrive at your new starting point. On a good day you'd just jump right into this but the brain fog makes it feel like you're swimming, mentally, through thick treacle. This slowdown might make you pause to assess whether it's the best time to even be working on this thing today at all (this is one of the ultimate First World problems) at which point you can get hung up on self-doubt and thinking about all the things that could go wrong with the task, rather than actually managing to start it. If in the end you decide the mountain is just too steep to climb, one or more of your other responsibilities will probably crop up to take its place. There'll be plenty more time for your brain to get back to thinking about how and when to continue the original task, though.
It gets slightly ridiculous when you've done huge amounts of this preliminary thinking about the task--if it's code, perhaps even having written much of it (incompletely) in your head--and even had some of these thoughts many times over--to the point that you've probably spent more time, even considerably more time, on that overthinking, than it would have taken you to just do the task itself, if only it weren't for the brain fog. It feels a bit like trying to start a car over and over again, but never keeping the key turned for quite long enough, as the battery slowly gets weaker and weaker, or Achilles chasing the tortoise, getting closer and closer, but never quite reaching him.
I've mentioned before that exercise can sometimes help to clear brain fog or depression a little bit. Structured procrastination is another solution that's occasionally helpful--just giving up and doing something else useful instead of the task you were trying to do. Recently though, my own favorite technique has been half-assing the tasks and lately even sort of quarter-assing them. It's a bit like rapid application prototyping without the corporate idealism. Not letting perfect be the enemy of barely satisfactory. It breaks the loop of negativity and doubt and once you have your shitty prototype it can always be improved upon later. That's what you'll keep telling yourself, anyway.
That's what this journal entry is as well. My own quarter-assed shitty little prototype. Enjoy.
I was at a bit of a loose end this morning because as well as finding SoylentNews throwing an Internal Server error (thanks for getting it back guys), yesterday my 12 year old PSU decided to give up on me just when I wanted to power up a new Linux install for the first time!
I started browsing for new PSUs but I've grown sort of fond of this one, and anyway I'd probably have to wait a few days for any replacement to arrive. I took the top off it, and found an internal fuse which tested fine with my meter.
The fault turned out to be a loose terminal on the big rocker power switch on the back. I suspect it's been like that for years and it might explain a few, err, unscheduled shutdowns--I thought it was my overclocking! I hadn't got anything to hand to replace the switch with right now, so it's been unceremoniously bypassed with a soldering iron and blanked off for the time being. It can be turned off at the plug!
I was saying on IRC the PSU was supposed to be rated for a Mean Time Before Failure of > 100,000 hours. Well 12 years is 4,384 days and I used it way less than 10 hours a day. I guess the switch just couldn't handle that many cycles. Should've just kept it on!
Let's see if it lasts another 12 years like this. They'll probably change the ATX connectors or motherboard voltages to the point I can't use it with contemporary hardware by then!
Ugh, far too many exclamation marks in this journal entry. Sorry about that!
A cool story, I know brah, but at least it beats photos of my lunch on social media.
I just read that Greta Thunberg has recorded a radio show called Humanity has not yet failed. Comparing her title to that of my last couple of journal entries, it seems, while thinking about a lot of the same issues, she's rather more optimistic than I am!
In reality of course it's a call to action and one I applaud. The levels of irritation she seems to cause in supporters of various vested interests tells me she must be doing something right!
It's worth mentioning that when I was searching for Greta's radio show link I was a little taken aback to see one of the highest ranking results in Duckduckgo was a National Review article attempting to discredit her. The argument seemed to revolve around pointing out that she was a child and then listing some negative generalizations about children--most notably claiming they just repeat what adults tell them. The unspoken suggestion to an adult reader of the article is that, of course, because they're adults and not silly children like Greta, they can form their own opinions about an important issue and certainly don't need to rely only on what other adults tell them. These intelligent, adult readers can always form cast iron, watertight opinions based on evidence. They certainly don't need a little girl, or, say, an opinion piece in a right wing magazine, to tell them what to think, or who to listen to! Certainly not! Oh, the delicious irony.
Is the universe broken? Is the universe evil? Does the universe reward evil? Mr Betteridge was unavailable for comment.
This is a follow-up to my earlier joural entry, Humanity Failed. When its admittedly pessimistic tone was pointed out to me in the comments, I wrote:
The point is that entropy means that it's much, much more more work to clean up and repair after a few bad apples have caused widespread harm and destruction than it is for those harms to be initiated. Advances in technology, the organization of large corporations and nations, and the sheer weight of numbers of the human population mean that today a handful of bad actors can easily wield sufficient power to ruin much of the world for centuries to come. At that point the strengths are irrelevant. Barring the invention of some self-replicating conservation bot, it's just too hard for the humans that care to keep healing the world when the ones that don't go on fucking it up on ever larger scales.
I admit it was all very bleak and one-sided. I do recognize that such a big decline is not the only possible outcome for humanity. It's just that having seen humans' greed, short-sightedness and ignorance triumph again and again over attempts to introduce greater compassion has made me believe that the decline is the most likely outcome, by a very long way. It doesn't necessarily mean that humans will become completely extinct, although they might, and it doesn't mean every last human will be destitute. I'm talking instead about an overall downward trend.
On this subject of entropy, Subsentient suggested perhaps the universe itself is broken in a sense that it rewards evil and chaos over goodness and order and that human misbehavior is a product of that. It's an interesting idea, which makes a certain amount of sense in that the second law of thermodynamics dictates that total entropy tends to increase over time, and I've certainly expressed my displeasure in the past about Heat Death as a likely fate of the universe.
I'm personally not inclined to blame the universe for humanity's ills. I wrote in the comments that entropy is what gives us possibilities and variation and without the countless disordered states, we wouldn't have many interesting and beautiful ordered ones. However, this is such an intriguing topic that I felt it deserved further thought.
Evolution can help to increase local order for a living organism, although everything any organism does, including what we'd normally consider morally good acts, increases entropy globally. It's something that nature has just had to deal with, work around, and often embrace. Death at the cellular level isn't a bug, it's a feature.
To answer whether our own universe might be broken, let's try to imagine a universe where the harmful aspects of entropy are less of a threat, a philosophical heaven if you like. Perhaps there could be some kind of limits on entropy. Matter could have a kind of memory (maybe some physical link to its past) that could favor it returning to an earlier, more ordered state. Say, for example, your house falls down, but all you have to do is start putting back a few of the bricks into the right place and it pops right back into its more stable and more ordered past state. While this might sound nice initially, without some serious tuning it could be catastrophically awful. Imagine a centuries old house spontaneously reassembling itself in the middle of your freshly prepared dinner. Or worse, in the middle of your body. It makes transporter beams look positively safe in comparison!
Another way a universe might seem less threatening could be if the building blocks of macroscopic objects could just be much harder to mess up and simpler to assemble, like a natural form of Lego bricks. The obvious problem with this particular design is it would massively limit the complexity of organisms and machines that could be constructed in the world. Things like brains might turn out impossible to build, so they'd have to be there since the beginning of time if you needed them to exist.
If these sorts of ideas were applied to our own universe, with the sort of problems I identified ironed out somehow, I think we'd be starting to get close to something a bit like some MMO game servers, where anti-griefing restrictions aim to limit the harm players can inflict on one another. In a game like Minecraft, for instance, some servers use block protection plugins or backups and rollback to stop griefers destroying players' buildings. This may make the more constructive players happy in the short to medium term but there are eventual limitations to how a universe like this can work.
The problem is that, just like our own civilizations, there's a limit to how many people such a world can support. If you ban the destruction of buildings, over time the world will completely fill up with them as the population increases. If you start to impose limits on building and land use, increasing numbers of people will inevitably end up homeless. A game server would avoid tricky moral issues like this by simply placing a limit on the number of players. On our own planet, population restrictions have been used occasionally with some success but they're exceedingly unpopular.
To take this idea, of modifying a universe's laws to make it harder to do evil, to its logical conclusion, one might hope that we'd end up with the sort of philosophical heaven we mentioned earlier. We might adopt a very carefully crafted moral code and make it into a physical law. For example, Azuma Hazuki suggested a modification of "love thy neighbor" into her Platinum Rule: "do unto others as they wish you to do unto them, provided you are not harming others in doing so." If we accept this as an absolute physical law for our universe it's likely to be an extremely rigid place, devoid of even the illusion of free will; lacking challenge; boring, even. Or perhaps even paradoxical. The more libertarian among us might call it the ultimate nanny state. To go back to our computer game analogy, it would be like an open-world game that is actually much too heavily scripted and restricted, disallowing much experimentation by the player that the designer didn't intend. Unless these moral restrictions on a universe arose by chance, such a place would be typical of what we might expect from intelligent design. In our own universe, we don't have these moral restrictions, so it's unfortunately (or fortunately) up to us to define the morals for ourselves. This is where I think we, as a species, fail, big time.
Some will say that nature places its own sort of Darwinian restrictions on the growth of a population, making the system self-correcting, and that it's only human sensibilities that cause people to want to reject such a brutal outcome. Certainly it's only humans on this planet that can speak and write about such suffering, but I think it's completely obvious that animals have just as strong an aversion to suffering, and in many cases empathy for the plight of others of their species and sometimes even other species. Where humans are unique is in the scale and speed with which they can change this natural system, either for the better, or, all too often, for the worse. Evolution can't keep up with the pace at which humans are changing their environment, causing a widespread loss of biodiversity. Along with many other species, we're all victims of humans' excessive success.
So, yeah, I still think it's not the universe that's broken, it's the human psyche.
